The project comprises an unprecedented wholesale reinterpretation of the religious landscape of Ancient Greece in the archaic and classical periods (roughly 800 – 323 BCE). It will utilise a theoretical framework I have developed specifically for this study: ‘Haptic Belief’ (HB). This framework takes an interdisciplinary approach considering the emotional, sensory, and cognitive dimensions of religious and ritual practices.
The study of ancient religion can only ever be the study of traces left by the people who practised it. Those traces are the words, objects, landscapes, and other ephemera that have come down to us. Using these traces, we must reconstruct the bricolage of religious experiences, emotions, sensations, and actions that occurred through each individual’s participation and interaction with other people, places, communities, objects, and systems. These interactions form the basis of religion in ancient Greece; they are vital to our understanding, not only of Greek religion but of Greek society more broadly, as religion was deeply embedded within all other aspects: political, economic, and socio-cultural. Such a study cannot be conducted from an etic position – we must also interrogate the internal position of practice. This can be achieved by studying the traces, objects, spaces, and words left behind.
The project will focus on three core research questions:
Haptic Belief: The Theoretical Framework Religious practice is an inherently dynamic process necessitated by multi-directional relationships between body and mind and between each individual and the collective, the situated environment, and the divine. The primary relationship is formed between the individual and the divine regardless of the number of intermediary layers, although these layers shape both individual and divine[1] in ways that neither can be independent of. That is, our experience of the world is facilitated by our experiences through the world. This facilitation is led primarily by sensory and emotive feedback, inseparable from religious belief: the ‘felt-life’ of belief (Morgan 2010: 57); Aristotle (De. An. 435a; Gen Corr 329b), too, says that touch is a bodily perception. In this way, haptics relates not only to touch but to the feedback of touch: the things we use, the energy we expend making and moving, and the environment we move in and through. The body is an instrument of religion, which has the same affect as other objects and things (referring specifically to objects taxonomically ‘unspecifiable’). This builds an ecology of objects and spaces, within which the person is only one part. Haptic Belief centres on the interaction between objects, spaces, and the people they affect. It enables us to examine how people experience religion physically, emotionally, and sensorily.
Religious experiences are delineated and enhanced by the objects, spaces, and traditions people encounter in their everyday worlds. The sensations and feelings of daily life are focused through the lens of the gods and their worship. This occurs in three interconnected but distinct ways. The first is through belief (and non-belief), which cannot be replicated from person to person but hangs together through a system of coherences (that is, people share common understandings about what things mean religiously) (Mackin Roberts 2020:12-14). The second is that ancient Greek religion is largely orthopraxic, so when one behaves ‘correctly’, they are accepted by the community regardless of personal beliefs. Finally, religious communities are fluid because ancient Greek religion allows individuals to retain some autonomy in crafting their religious practice by participating in various public and private cults. Thus, belonging to a religious community is a multi-layered experience, a bricolage of networked experiences, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and practices. While political identity is required for participation in some religious communities, others require different kinds of identity. These might include households and families, neighbourhoods, age or gender groups, or more broadly encompassing several poleis (‘citizen-states’) or even the entire Greek world. In tracing the material remains of these beliefs, this project will give a new understanding of individuals' religious – and, therefore, everyday – lives in Ancient Athens and Attica.
Material culture and site-based experience embodies – and is embedded within – religious practices, which occur through participation in the groups and institutions that make up the city’s civic, social, and private spheres. HB differs from other material or sensorial methods because it crucially describes how the body becomes an object in religious practice to define the embodied nature of religious practice in a system predominantly driven by tradition.
Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Haptic Belief in Action By way of example, I would like to offer a brief case study demonstrating how and why Haptic Belief can give this new understanding of ancient Greek religion. The Brauronia was a penteteric Athenian festival dedicated to Artemis, during which you girls between 5 and 10 ‘played bears’ (Ar. Lys. 636-644/5; schol. Ar. Lys 636; Suda s.v. Brauronia; Heyschius s.v. Brauronios Arkteia; Harpocration s.v. arkeusai; Bekker Anecdota Graeca s.v. arkeusai; Faraone 2003). This likely involved a form of ‘sacred drama’, but we do not know precisely what that was. Reportedly the girls wore ‘saffron dresses’. Thus, the festival day would have been marked out, beginning prior to arrival at the festival, through the donning of these dresses. We must, then, consider the different physical sensations of such festival costumes - whether the comfort of more luxurious fabric or the scratch of an unfamiliar one. It is almost certain that there would have been a variety of sensations experienced by the girls simply related to the embodied experience of wearing different clothing (Bugg 2014). We know that special garments were worn at many festivals, and we have ample evidence of regulations for dress within sanctuaries and visual representation of people undertaking ritual activities wearing specific dress types. Dress here can indicate belonging; clothing makes identity statements in both ‘open’ (easily discernible to someone outside the cultural context) and ‘closed’ (reinforcing established subtextual meanings) ways (Lee 2015: 21); an avenue to manipulate the outward expression of identity by ‘dressing the part’. In this way, dress is also a way to communicate political and cultural subtext that may not be directly related to the specific event but could be more broadly socially applicable (Arthur 2000:2-3).
This line of enquiry - while worthwhile - relates to how clothing looks rather than how it feels on the body. The haptic intrusion is created by the feeling of cloth on the skin, which would change throughout the day as individuals move and perform. This is to say that the haptic perception changes with and is heightened by kinaesthetic perception, the ‘sense of movement’, which renders this form of constant touch as embodied. It is also multi-modal; clothing mediates between the individual and the world - including through variation in external factors like weather and physical contact with other objects and people. For example, at a festival in which one of the main activities appears to involve participants undertaking physically exerting activities, they would have come into such physical contact in both specific and ordered ways (holding hands, dancing together) and in accidental and unanticipated ways (bumping against one another, jostling for space).
Aristotle (De An 435a) says touch is a bodily perception, but he also connects the properties of touch to sight (Arist. Sens. 442b). Clothing was not only a sensory experience for the wearer but also for the viewer. From archaeological and visual evidence, we are well aware that there were a variety of colours and patterns that could have been employed and that perfume could be applied to textiles (Spantidaki 2016:78-90, 94). The clothing catalogues from the Brauronia on the Akropolis (see further below) cite many descriptions of colours and patterns, including frog-coloured, saffron, washed out, ‘real purple’, fringed, embroidered, bordered, with parabolic stripes. This is all part of a circuit of culture: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation (du Gay et al. 1997:3-4). These are continually overlapping and repeating categories, which converge at the site of performance: the feeling of a garment against the skin, the visual impact of the garment on the audience, and the subtext of a garment as a mode of communicating status. All these elements are enabled by the skilled production of the garment and by (written and unwritten) regulations about the wearing of such garments in such contexts. Production is an important aspect of this circuit, even in religious performance. All Athenian women would have been involved in cloth production at some point in their lives.
Garments are incredibly important in the religious lives of women in Ancient Greece (Mackin Roberts 2019). Specifically at Brauron, where there is a record of clothing items dedicated to the goddess – although we do not have the catalogue from Brauron, we have a copy from the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis. The catalogue comprises thirteen fragments from six stele covering the periods 349/8-342/1 and 338/7-336/5 BCE. The 276 garments listed in the fragmentary catalogue were dedicated by real women (behaving), whose names are recorded on a physical artefact (the stele), representing other physical objects which are now lost to us (the garments). The catalogue represents a collection mediated through the administrative polis (belonging). Still, it also evokes the sensory memory of these garments, many of which had been worn, and some are described explicitly as ‘worn out’ (behaving, believing). Nine garments are described as ‘half-woven’, taken to mean that the women died before finishing the garments and were dedicated on her behalf. Of interest here are the descriptive terms that indicate how garments might have felt: fine linen, luxurious, smooth, coarse. Of course, not all of these garments would have been worn during the festival. Still, some conclusions may be drawn about the different classes of women represented by the different representative costs of garments as described. What is not in dispute is that these descriptions represent real garments made by the hand of real women, worn on the bodies of real women, and dedicated by real women and their families.
By beginning at the inscribed stele, our extant objects, using Haptic Belief, we can start to construct a networked assemblage of people, objects, places, activities, and sensory experiences that build our understanding of the religious landscape of the ritual activity at Brauron, and by extension of the religious landscape of Athens more broadly. For example, the dedicated garments described represent intentional choices made by women and their families; some of these - those described as ‘saffron coloured’ - may have been worn by young girls during their roles ‘playing the bear’. There is an emotional aspect to this ritual process - to any ritual, but in considering children particularly, ‘make-believe’ becomes real. It is highly appropriate for fully-immersive make-believe religious activities to be tasked to children because they have the ability to be lost within the ritual (Lynch 2010: 53; Orsi 2005; Winnicott 1971:7, 18). The girls who become immersed in the wildness of ‘playing the bear’ are transformed from girls into ritual objects that act in service to the community. Finally, there is the sensory ritualscape created by the community together, mainly related to haptic and kinaesthetic perceptions, in conjunction with other external sensory intrusions: temperature, sounds, and smells. Their bodies, their movement, their interaction with the landscape, one another, any onlookers, and other ritual objects, create this networked assemblage which allows us to construct a picture of the communities (belonging), the way the girls and audience emotionally relate to Artemis (believing), and the communal understanding of the correct way to worship the goddess to ensure she accepts their offerings (behaving).
Scholarly Background It is easiest to study ancient Greek religion from an etic position, which privileges public practices over personal belief; this is predominantly due to our distance from ancient people and the issues inherent in studying the ancient past. It has been enabled by the prevalence of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood's Polis religion theory (Sourvinou-Inwood 2000a; 2000b). This theory posits that all religious practice is predicated on the polis. Within this framework, all religion, both public and private, was mediated through the polis. At this time, the Greek world was made up of hundreds of independent poleis loosely connected by some shared culture, language, and religious practice (cf. Hdt. 8.144.2). Thus, religion was 'embedded' within the political structure – that is, religion was deeply enmeshed with all other political, civic, and economic aspects of the city. Polis religion theorises that the most critical religious identity was based on citizenship, and the most important religious body was the city. Studies utilising this approach do not purposefully ignore the role of individual practices. Instead, they begin from the polis,where religion is primarily facilitated. Additionally, personal experiences are harder to reconstruct or interpret, even more so when we do not adequately understand the framework into which those individuals' experiences fit.
Many studies that focus on polis-centred religion give us a framework to examine the individual in earnest. More recently, scholars have started to restate the importance of the individual (e.g. Eidinow 2015; Graf 2013; Kindt 2015, Rüpke 2013; Rask 2016), even within the bounds of the polis. However, much of this work still presents studies based on the theory of polis religion, either with a simple acknowledgement of personal belief (e.g. Kindt 2015) or which offers a critique of polis religion in the context of individual faith (e.g. Bremmer 2010). While this has been a necessary step in the study of ancient religion, neither of these approaches captures the complexity of the interrelationship between public practice and personal belief. A complete picture of the religious landscape of Greece in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE requires a holistic re-examination of ancient Greek religion, encompassing both the public and personal spheres, with the individual as the foundation.
Originality and Innovation BBB will be a significant contributor to studies of ancient Mediterranean religion and, by extension, the broader socio-cultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean, thanks to its development of new ways of approaching evidence related to the sensory and emotive aspects of religious practice, and an entirely new theoretical framework for considering the integrated nature of public and private religion, and the embeddedness of religion in society. Crucially, the project moves beyond traditional understandings of religion as centred around the polis, which has had wide-reaching impacts on our understanding of religion and belief and politics, culture, art, and society. Instead of a framework centred around the polis, BBB instead offers an innovated, process-focused, individual approach to belief, faith, practice and the interrelationship of religion and other spheres of the polis (including at lower municipal levels) and the wider Greek world. This approach privileges the individual, their experiences, the physicality and embodied nature of religion and the cognitive aspects of practice. By adopting this approach, the project is able to recognise the meaningful links between individuals and the divine and the role of myriad intermediary layers, including the people and traditions of communities of various sizes. In doing so, the project will present a substantively different understanding approach to ancient Greek, and specifically Athenian, religion (than presented in, e.g. Parker 1996, 2005), and will become a central theoretical framework for anyone trying to approach ancient religion or cultural studies from an individual-focused, cognitive, embodied, and sensory perspective going forward.
[1] This projects purposefully approaches ‘the divine’ from the position of a believer. This is not to negate the experience of the non-believer in an embedded and structural religious practice in which everyone must participate – in fact, this will be an important question that the project addresses.
The study of ancient religion can only ever be the study of traces left by the people who practised it. Those traces are the words, objects, landscapes, and other ephemera that have come down to us. Using these traces, we must reconstruct the bricolage of religious experiences, emotions, sensations, and actions that occurred through each individual’s participation and interaction with other people, places, communities, objects, and systems. These interactions form the basis of religion in ancient Greece; they are vital to our understanding, not only of Greek religion but of Greek society more broadly, as religion was deeply embedded within all other aspects: political, economic, and socio-cultural. Such a study cannot be conducted from an etic position – we must also interrogate the internal position of practice. This can be achieved by studying the traces, objects, spaces, and words left behind.
The project will focus on three core research questions:
- In what ways is the relationship between individuals and the divine articulated in the socio-cultural landscape of archaic and classical Greece?
- How can a touch-based sensory approach to embodied religion (e.g. HB) expand our understanding of religious practices and beliefs in the ancient world and the social, cultural, and political landscapes?
- Can we use our understanding of the relationship between individuals and the divine and a new touch-based sensory approach (HB) to substantively move our knowledge of the ancient world forward, particularly in understanding faith and belief?
Haptic Belief: The Theoretical Framework Religious practice is an inherently dynamic process necessitated by multi-directional relationships between body and mind and between each individual and the collective, the situated environment, and the divine. The primary relationship is formed between the individual and the divine regardless of the number of intermediary layers, although these layers shape both individual and divine[1] in ways that neither can be independent of. That is, our experience of the world is facilitated by our experiences through the world. This facilitation is led primarily by sensory and emotive feedback, inseparable from religious belief: the ‘felt-life’ of belief (Morgan 2010: 57); Aristotle (De. An. 435a; Gen Corr 329b), too, says that touch is a bodily perception. In this way, haptics relates not only to touch but to the feedback of touch: the things we use, the energy we expend making and moving, and the environment we move in and through. The body is an instrument of religion, which has the same affect as other objects and things (referring specifically to objects taxonomically ‘unspecifiable’). This builds an ecology of objects and spaces, within which the person is only one part. Haptic Belief centres on the interaction between objects, spaces, and the people they affect. It enables us to examine how people experience religion physically, emotionally, and sensorily.
Religious experiences are delineated and enhanced by the objects, spaces, and traditions people encounter in their everyday worlds. The sensations and feelings of daily life are focused through the lens of the gods and their worship. This occurs in three interconnected but distinct ways. The first is through belief (and non-belief), which cannot be replicated from person to person but hangs together through a system of coherences (that is, people share common understandings about what things mean religiously) (Mackin Roberts 2020:12-14). The second is that ancient Greek religion is largely orthopraxic, so when one behaves ‘correctly’, they are accepted by the community regardless of personal beliefs. Finally, religious communities are fluid because ancient Greek religion allows individuals to retain some autonomy in crafting their religious practice by participating in various public and private cults. Thus, belonging to a religious community is a multi-layered experience, a bricolage of networked experiences, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and practices. While political identity is required for participation in some religious communities, others require different kinds of identity. These might include households and families, neighbourhoods, age or gender groups, or more broadly encompassing several poleis (‘citizen-states’) or even the entire Greek world. In tracing the material remains of these beliefs, this project will give a new understanding of individuals' religious – and, therefore, everyday – lives in Ancient Athens and Attica.
Material culture and site-based experience embodies – and is embedded within – religious practices, which occur through participation in the groups and institutions that make up the city’s civic, social, and private spheres. HB differs from other material or sensorial methods because it crucially describes how the body becomes an object in religious practice to define the embodied nature of religious practice in a system predominantly driven by tradition.
Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Haptic Belief in Action By way of example, I would like to offer a brief case study demonstrating how and why Haptic Belief can give this new understanding of ancient Greek religion. The Brauronia was a penteteric Athenian festival dedicated to Artemis, during which you girls between 5 and 10 ‘played bears’ (Ar. Lys. 636-644/5; schol. Ar. Lys 636; Suda s.v. Brauronia; Heyschius s.v. Brauronios Arkteia; Harpocration s.v. arkeusai; Bekker Anecdota Graeca s.v. arkeusai; Faraone 2003). This likely involved a form of ‘sacred drama’, but we do not know precisely what that was. Reportedly the girls wore ‘saffron dresses’. Thus, the festival day would have been marked out, beginning prior to arrival at the festival, through the donning of these dresses. We must, then, consider the different physical sensations of such festival costumes - whether the comfort of more luxurious fabric or the scratch of an unfamiliar one. It is almost certain that there would have been a variety of sensations experienced by the girls simply related to the embodied experience of wearing different clothing (Bugg 2014). We know that special garments were worn at many festivals, and we have ample evidence of regulations for dress within sanctuaries and visual representation of people undertaking ritual activities wearing specific dress types. Dress here can indicate belonging; clothing makes identity statements in both ‘open’ (easily discernible to someone outside the cultural context) and ‘closed’ (reinforcing established subtextual meanings) ways (Lee 2015: 21); an avenue to manipulate the outward expression of identity by ‘dressing the part’. In this way, dress is also a way to communicate political and cultural subtext that may not be directly related to the specific event but could be more broadly socially applicable (Arthur 2000:2-3).
This line of enquiry - while worthwhile - relates to how clothing looks rather than how it feels on the body. The haptic intrusion is created by the feeling of cloth on the skin, which would change throughout the day as individuals move and perform. This is to say that the haptic perception changes with and is heightened by kinaesthetic perception, the ‘sense of movement’, which renders this form of constant touch as embodied. It is also multi-modal; clothing mediates between the individual and the world - including through variation in external factors like weather and physical contact with other objects and people. For example, at a festival in which one of the main activities appears to involve participants undertaking physically exerting activities, they would have come into such physical contact in both specific and ordered ways (holding hands, dancing together) and in accidental and unanticipated ways (bumping against one another, jostling for space).
Aristotle (De An 435a) says touch is a bodily perception, but he also connects the properties of touch to sight (Arist. Sens. 442b). Clothing was not only a sensory experience for the wearer but also for the viewer. From archaeological and visual evidence, we are well aware that there were a variety of colours and patterns that could have been employed and that perfume could be applied to textiles (Spantidaki 2016:78-90, 94). The clothing catalogues from the Brauronia on the Akropolis (see further below) cite many descriptions of colours and patterns, including frog-coloured, saffron, washed out, ‘real purple’, fringed, embroidered, bordered, with parabolic stripes. This is all part of a circuit of culture: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation (du Gay et al. 1997:3-4). These are continually overlapping and repeating categories, which converge at the site of performance: the feeling of a garment against the skin, the visual impact of the garment on the audience, and the subtext of a garment as a mode of communicating status. All these elements are enabled by the skilled production of the garment and by (written and unwritten) regulations about the wearing of such garments in such contexts. Production is an important aspect of this circuit, even in religious performance. All Athenian women would have been involved in cloth production at some point in their lives.
Garments are incredibly important in the religious lives of women in Ancient Greece (Mackin Roberts 2019). Specifically at Brauron, where there is a record of clothing items dedicated to the goddess – although we do not have the catalogue from Brauron, we have a copy from the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis. The catalogue comprises thirteen fragments from six stele covering the periods 349/8-342/1 and 338/7-336/5 BCE. The 276 garments listed in the fragmentary catalogue were dedicated by real women (behaving), whose names are recorded on a physical artefact (the stele), representing other physical objects which are now lost to us (the garments). The catalogue represents a collection mediated through the administrative polis (belonging). Still, it also evokes the sensory memory of these garments, many of which had been worn, and some are described explicitly as ‘worn out’ (behaving, believing). Nine garments are described as ‘half-woven’, taken to mean that the women died before finishing the garments and were dedicated on her behalf. Of interest here are the descriptive terms that indicate how garments might have felt: fine linen, luxurious, smooth, coarse. Of course, not all of these garments would have been worn during the festival. Still, some conclusions may be drawn about the different classes of women represented by the different representative costs of garments as described. What is not in dispute is that these descriptions represent real garments made by the hand of real women, worn on the bodies of real women, and dedicated by real women and their families.
By beginning at the inscribed stele, our extant objects, using Haptic Belief, we can start to construct a networked assemblage of people, objects, places, activities, and sensory experiences that build our understanding of the religious landscape of the ritual activity at Brauron, and by extension of the religious landscape of Athens more broadly. For example, the dedicated garments described represent intentional choices made by women and their families; some of these - those described as ‘saffron coloured’ - may have been worn by young girls during their roles ‘playing the bear’. There is an emotional aspect to this ritual process - to any ritual, but in considering children particularly, ‘make-believe’ becomes real. It is highly appropriate for fully-immersive make-believe religious activities to be tasked to children because they have the ability to be lost within the ritual (Lynch 2010: 53; Orsi 2005; Winnicott 1971:7, 18). The girls who become immersed in the wildness of ‘playing the bear’ are transformed from girls into ritual objects that act in service to the community. Finally, there is the sensory ritualscape created by the community together, mainly related to haptic and kinaesthetic perceptions, in conjunction with other external sensory intrusions: temperature, sounds, and smells. Their bodies, their movement, their interaction with the landscape, one another, any onlookers, and other ritual objects, create this networked assemblage which allows us to construct a picture of the communities (belonging), the way the girls and audience emotionally relate to Artemis (believing), and the communal understanding of the correct way to worship the goddess to ensure she accepts their offerings (behaving).
Scholarly Background It is easiest to study ancient Greek religion from an etic position, which privileges public practices over personal belief; this is predominantly due to our distance from ancient people and the issues inherent in studying the ancient past. It has been enabled by the prevalence of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood's Polis religion theory (Sourvinou-Inwood 2000a; 2000b). This theory posits that all religious practice is predicated on the polis. Within this framework, all religion, both public and private, was mediated through the polis. At this time, the Greek world was made up of hundreds of independent poleis loosely connected by some shared culture, language, and religious practice (cf. Hdt. 8.144.2). Thus, religion was 'embedded' within the political structure – that is, religion was deeply enmeshed with all other political, civic, and economic aspects of the city. Polis religion theorises that the most critical religious identity was based on citizenship, and the most important religious body was the city. Studies utilising this approach do not purposefully ignore the role of individual practices. Instead, they begin from the polis,where religion is primarily facilitated. Additionally, personal experiences are harder to reconstruct or interpret, even more so when we do not adequately understand the framework into which those individuals' experiences fit.
Many studies that focus on polis-centred religion give us a framework to examine the individual in earnest. More recently, scholars have started to restate the importance of the individual (e.g. Eidinow 2015; Graf 2013; Kindt 2015, Rüpke 2013; Rask 2016), even within the bounds of the polis. However, much of this work still presents studies based on the theory of polis religion, either with a simple acknowledgement of personal belief (e.g. Kindt 2015) or which offers a critique of polis religion in the context of individual faith (e.g. Bremmer 2010). While this has been a necessary step in the study of ancient religion, neither of these approaches captures the complexity of the interrelationship between public practice and personal belief. A complete picture of the religious landscape of Greece in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE requires a holistic re-examination of ancient Greek religion, encompassing both the public and personal spheres, with the individual as the foundation.
Originality and Innovation BBB will be a significant contributor to studies of ancient Mediterranean religion and, by extension, the broader socio-cultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean, thanks to its development of new ways of approaching evidence related to the sensory and emotive aspects of religious practice, and an entirely new theoretical framework for considering the integrated nature of public and private religion, and the embeddedness of religion in society. Crucially, the project moves beyond traditional understandings of religion as centred around the polis, which has had wide-reaching impacts on our understanding of religion and belief and politics, culture, art, and society. Instead of a framework centred around the polis, BBB instead offers an innovated, process-focused, individual approach to belief, faith, practice and the interrelationship of religion and other spheres of the polis (including at lower municipal levels) and the wider Greek world. This approach privileges the individual, their experiences, the physicality and embodied nature of religion and the cognitive aspects of practice. By adopting this approach, the project is able to recognise the meaningful links between individuals and the divine and the role of myriad intermediary layers, including the people and traditions of communities of various sizes. In doing so, the project will present a substantively different understanding approach to ancient Greek, and specifically Athenian, religion (than presented in, e.g. Parker 1996, 2005), and will become a central theoretical framework for anyone trying to approach ancient religion or cultural studies from an individual-focused, cognitive, embodied, and sensory perspective going forward.
[1] This projects purposefully approaches ‘the divine’ from the position of a believer. This is not to negate the experience of the non-believer in an embedded and structural religious practice in which everyone must participate – in fact, this will be an important question that the project addresses.
